Walking in Mind

A Trail of Thoughts

Tag Archives: Sant Pere de Ribes


by 10 Comments

Will You Take My Hand?

Seven weeks have passed since the Spanish Prime Minister first addressed the nation to announce the harshest of lockdowns. Seven weeks in which I’ve not walked as much as a kilometre for pleasure.

Do you need food, something from the pharmacy? Then make it quick, but don’t linger. Keep your distance, get your things, head back home.

You have a dog? Well OK, twice a day around the block.

A few people improvise, but it doesn’t last, and by the second week there are no more stories of cats or goats being walked on leads.

What persists is the confinement of children, whose developmental needs trail behind a dog’s need to shit in the street. I phone my friends with small children to see how they are doing, cooped up together in apartments with only a balcony for outdoor space. We’re getting by, they say.

I go out to buy bread and discover that childless streets are the saddest of places. After six weeks they are finally allowed out, not for long, but it is something, and it shows on the faces of young and old alike.

Now, on this first Saturday in May, it is our turn, an opening for those of us who wish simply to walk without purpose, to work up a sweat, to pedal like there was no tomorrow.

It is still early, a little after 8 when P. and I leave the house. The rules are as follows. As two people from the same household we are allowed to walk side by side, but if we’re venturing out to practise sport then we need to separate and go it alone. I wonder where the line is drawn. At what speed, or with what gait, does walking become something other than itself? And what about the fact that we have dressed for the occasion in our best outdoor gear? Do our trail shoes and hiking shorts place us in the world of sport, even if we keep to an amble? In the space of fifty days the absurd has become a topic of ordinary questioning.

We live near the edge of town and are soon making our way down a narrow path between dry stone walls. To the east the sun is already well above the line of hills beyond which lies the sea we are not allowed to visit. But there is more than enough to satisfy our longing. Grasses hang firm and free across the path, and give way gracefully to our passing shins. To either side the hedgerows are putting on a festival of spring flowers, none of which had emerged when last we walked this way. Is borage always this blue, are poppies always so red, or have my senses been altered by so much confinement? I bend down to pick a single poppy from a cluster and walk over to where P. is standing, lost in reverie as she gazes out across the vineyards. I hand her the flower, she smiles, kisses me once and slips the poppy into a shoulder loop of her little backpack.

From time to time we meet others along the way, and I greet them all with a Bon dia. Some return the salutation, others — invariably the maskwearers — glance at me in silence from the corner of an eye. People are afraid, wary of others. If I offer to lend a hand, will you trust me that it’s clean? L’enfer, c’est les autres. Sartre’s words echo across the years with a new twist in meaning. But it is not what I feel. Hell is not other people, it is being unable to embrace them, to laugh and cry together, to raise a glass in sickness and in health. So take off your mask, show your face, ready your lips. This is what I dream of now.

When we reach home again I stop in front of the gate and kneel at the kerb to inspect our new pavement companion, Diplotaxis muralis, the annual wall-rocket. Each day I am half surprised and full of joy to find the plant still there, standing ever taller where normally it would have no place, its yellow flowers a beacon of hope. I doubt it will make it through to summer. Sooner or later, it will be uprooted or stamped on by someone who sees it as an affront to normality rather than a reminder of what is possible. One hand flat against the paving stones, I reach out with the other and rest a finger against a delicate petal, and in that touching I remember something that Leonard Cohen wrote in a poem, a song: there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

I push myself upright and head indoors. The cat is asleep in her chair, the kitchen smells of freshly ground coffee, and all our things are where we left them. For an instant all is right with the world, but then it cuts through, the voice of the poet singer, his eye on the future, coming at me clear from the tower of song.

Things are going to slide

Slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore.

 

Diplotaxis muralis, annual wall-rocket


by 3 Comments

Seeing, Feeling, Telling

1. In Catalan

Entre marges i vinyes

hi ha un camí

que em porta

a la gratitud de viure.

 

2. Landschap

 

3. En anglès

A spring afternoon,

between stone wall and vines,

I stumble across

the gratitude

for what is,

for a place

becoming home.

 

4. What do you see, what do you feel, in the language(s) you inhabit?

 

5. The invitation of the poet, Neruda:

…que no nos llenemos la boca […] con tanto tuyo y tanto mío

…let us not fill our mouths […] with so much of yours and mine

 

6. Rebel against hate, rebel against indifference, rebel against those who would divide us.


by 5 Comments

Salut

Tomorrow (29 June) is the Feast of Saint Peter, so here in my Catalan hometown of Sant Pere de Ribes it’s time for our annual festival. The sun is shining and the atmosphere on the streets is a lesson in conviviality.

The festivities were formally inaugurated a couple of hours ago in the town square. Each year is the same. At 1 p.m. the toll of the church bells is followed by the explosive sound of a series of mortars. Boom, boom, boom. And then the fun really starts. Here’s a photo of the town square just before it all kicked off:

 

img_5216

Strung between lamp-posts and trees, tens upon tens of fireworks, small sticks of dynamite linked in one long fuse.

You have to give the Catalans their due. They don’t let health and safety get in the way of a good street party. Well, OK, they did put up a flimsy plastic tape to keep the public out of the arena!

Anyway, the video below should give you a taster of what happened next.

For now, and in the spirit of these festivities, I raise my glass to you all, and wish you Salut – especially if your name so happens to be Peter or Pere or Pierre.

 

 

 

 


by 2 Comments

Via Artis

This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance, he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Müller’s engraving after it had become superimposed in his mind…

– W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

 

I must have walked this route a hundred times, have contemplated these walls, these fields so often that what I see is perhaps more memory than perception. Something was different this morning. Perhaps the storm of last night had blown the dregs of winter from the air, sharpening the spring light, recasting the terrain. Or perhaps something had shifted in me. Maybe I was more willing than usual to look without remembering, or without wishing the world into view. Approach each session without memory or desire was the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s advice to those who sought to learn his trade. This morning I looked through the familiar and the same things became something else, a brief outline of a story that began to be told thousands of years ago. Four stations along the via artis.

 

  1. Petrograph

 

2. Chiaroscuro

 

3. Impressionism

 

4. Abstract Expressionism

 

5. Epilogue: The challenge we face


by 1 Comment

Elsewhere

Launched in the spring of 2015, Elsewhere is, in the words of its Editor-in-Chief, Paul Scraton, “a journal dedicated to writing and visual art that explores the idea of place in all its forms, whether city neighbourhoods or island communities, heartlands or borderlands, the world we see before us or landscapes of the imagination”.

Alongside the print journal, the Elsewhere website also hosts a blog, to which I am delighted to have contributed a piece of writing entitled A Dance of Memory. You can read my piece here, although I recommend you also have a leisurely browse around the Elsewhere website. The print journal appears twice a year, and you can take out a subscription covering four issues for just €48.

IMG_3587


by 2 Comments

Two Trees

Ca-ca-ca-cak. Ca-ca-ca-cak. I hear them before I see them. One, then a second magpie bobbing around beneath one of the old carob trees that stand just off the riera, the now dry stream bed along which I am walking. The landscape around Sant Pere de Ribes is veined with several of these stony conduits, and since moving here three years ago I have followed their course, up into the hills to the west, or down to the sea some five kilometres to the east. I’m not going far today, however; I’m just using the stream bed as a logical way to orbit the town before nightfall.

The last hour of the last day of autumn. Surely a fine time for a walk. Forty minutes ago I had closed the front gate and looked up at a crisp Mediterranean sky with my coat still open, but the sun has dropped now behind the hills and the afternoon has turned dummity and cold. I button my coat and climb up out of the riera onto the path of dry compacted mud that runs along its side. The carob trees that line the way are restless now with the song of invisible birds calling out the passing of the day. In response, I find myself whistling the refrain of a Duke Ellington tune I’d been listening to at lunchtime, an eleven-note clarinet lick mimicking the Bluebird of Delhi.

I follow the path for a couple of hundred metres and then, after passing beneath the stone road bridge and its red-metal pedestrian twin that allow passage in and out of this side of town, I climb again, up the stony bank and onto firmer ground. Ahead of me on the same side of the road a paired line of Aleppo pines form an inviting tunnel through which I have often walked, but it is not these trees that have brought me this way. The tree I want to look at is an ash, and it stands at the edge of the little car park on the other side of the road.

The ash has lost now the last of its leaves, but a few bunches of brown keys still hang from its lower branches. I reach up and cup one of the clusters in my left hand. By keeping my palm steady I find that I can move my fingertips across individual keys without dislodging the whole cluster. Their touch reminds me of the fine tissue paper that my watchmaker father always used to protect the disassembled pieces of a work in progress. I open my palm and watch as two dry seeds spin slowly to the ground.

The browns and greys of the wintering tree contrast with the exaggerated tones of the plastic flowers that are strapped to its trunk. I think that someone has altered the arrangement since I was last here, but I can’t be sure. Plastic flowers give nothing away. They don’t wilt or fade, which I guess is the point. As a memorial they are meant to symbolise permanence, a triumph over time and events. Yet in wishing for a place where nothing is lost, we cut ourselves off from the gift of living in time, from the possibility of renewal. An absence of decay is not necessarily a sign of life.

I didn’t know Toni personally, although he’d served me on a number of occasions when I bought stuff from the hardware store where he worked. I’d also seen him a couple of times while out walking the woods around town, his face recognisable despite the helmet as he scudded by on his mountain bike. A man in his thirties from a local family, a friendly face at work. That was as much as I knew about him.

The absurdity of the accident must make the loss even harder to swallow. The little car park whose border is marked by four ash trees is an obvious place to leave your car if you’ve just finished your morning shift at the hardware store and are now planning to spend the afternoon up in the hills on your mountain bike. Toni had probably parked there on countless occasions, and he would have been aware of the slope and camber of the ground. As he unloaded his bike through the hatchback door, he wouldn’t have expected the car to move, and it was no doubt an instinctive action to push against it. The mechanics of it all favour a loss of footing, and then a drag until the first obstacle is met. Apparently the paramedics were soon at the scene, doing their best at the foot of an ash.

With the last light seeping from the day I decide to head for home. The road rises past the little car park, and then more steeply still towards the top end of town. Halfway up the hill I take a right turn along a street that gives me a level run to my own, and it is there that I am puzzled by the lights up ahead, braids of red that seem suspended in the air. As I approach the junction I see the source. Where the four streets meet there is a small roundabout, its central island home to an old carob tree that has held its ground throughout the development of the neighbourhood. Since I last passed by a week ago the tree has become a Christmas carob, its trunk and major branches adorned with beaded strands of tiny red lights. I like what has been done to the tree, and I’m sure Ramón will be able to tell me more about it.

Ramón and his wife Marta run the delicatessen that stands just off the roundabout, and they can be relied upon for good cheese and local news. I’m barely through the door before Ramón greets me with a resounding ‘Hombre, ¿qué tal? ¡Cuánto tiempo!’. I smile at the thought that for him, a customer he hasn’t seen for a week should be welcomed with the words long time no see. While I choose the cheese and ham that will be tonight’s supper I ask him about the tree. He looks up, places the knife on the wooden board in front of him and pushes his shoulders back until they are straight.

‘That’s our doing’, he says. ‘Well, not just us, the other shops along here have all chipped in. Council wouldn’t put up ten cents, even said we’d have to get special permission to hook the lights up to the grid.’

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Good on you.’

‘If it was up to me,’ Ramón said, ‘I’d have music playing in the street as well. Bring a bit of warmth to people’s lives.’

Having bought more than I need from the wily vendor I step back out into the evening and head off toward home. There is a hint of wood smoke in the air, and I think that perhaps I too will lay a fire in, make the house warm for when my wife gets home. Pausing at the end of the street I take a last look back at the illuminated carob, and there in the shimmer of its lights see the spectre of an ash standing alongside it. Two trees. One for sorrow, one for joy.

IMG_0380

IMG_0381

IMG_0382

IMG_0386


by 2 Comments

In The Company Of Animals

It is the end of winter and I am out on the cusp of night and day. There is nothing of the frost of the last few mornings, and I know before I look that the stars will be tucked beneath a blanket of cloud. As I drop the latch on the front gate a familiar feral cat emerges from beneath a parked car and mews at me in hope. ‘You’ll have to wait, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

I stride off towards the southern edge of town and soon I am crossing the bridge across the riera, the seasonal watercourse that forms a natural boundary between the last houses and the fields beyond. Along the dry streambank a line of leafless poplars stand like giant upturned besoms. If I could I would take one and sweep the sky clean.

Beyond the bridge the road becomes first a gravelly path and then a more rugged track that cuts across the fields between drystone walls. A daylight of sorts is beginning to unfold around me now, although the sky remains the colour of wet clay. I know what my Catalan mother-in-law would say: Cielo de panza de burra, agua segura. When the sky is the colour of a donkey’s belly, it’s sure to rain.

Of all the local walks I’ve invented since moving to Sant Pere de Ribes three years ago, this is the one I keep coming back to. Eight kilometres of familiar yet unexhausted paths that can lead me into the day, much as a favourite bedtime story would ease me into sleep as a child. If, back then, the reward for early to bed was an extra chapter, then the prize for an early start today is in sharing the morning with others: with the rabbit shooting across my path and into the carob grove for cover, with the pied wagtails breakfasting on bugs in the freshly tilled field to the west, and with the pair of peacocks.

I hear their plaintive call well before reaching the end of the track and the smallholding where they live, but it is not until I am parallel to the farmhouse that I see them perched atop the two chimneys like ceremonial cowls, their draping trains tickling the terracotta roof tiles below. As I stand there watching, one of them begins to shake its tail feathers from side to side, and I’m reminded of a news article I’d read about the work of two Canadian researchers, Angela Freeman and James Hare. They discovered that the train displays of peacocks produce infrasonic signals, sounds that cannot be detected by the human ear but which both male and female peafowl are able to perceive. Freeman and Hare speculate that these infrasounds have something to do with maintaining territory, and may also add to the visual power of the trains in attracting females. If they are right, then there is something tragic about these two peacocks dutifully calling out and shaking their trains, despite living here in a kind of avian exile, far from others of their kind who might listen with more than superficial interest.

Beyond the smallholding the stony track narrows and becomes earthy as it skirts around the edge of the hamlet of Puigmoltó. It is here that my spirits are lifted again as I gaze ahead at what might as well be a field of strawberry ice cream flecked with the last snowflakes of winter. The path ends at the stone wall which encloses the grove, and here, up close, the colour scheme shifts. I reach over the wall and snap a flower from each of the two species of tree, letting them rest side by side in my palm. Now I can see that although the bitter almond blossom is predominantly pink and that of the sweet almond white, the delicate flowers of each contain subtle tones of both colours. Strawberry mixed with snow.

I let the petals fall to the ground and climb the gentle incline into the scraggy woodland to the south of the almond grove. First I follow a broad and stony track, then veer off down a half-hidden mulchy path that cuts back and forth through an undergrowth thick with mastic, rosemary and dwarf juniper. The sides of this path are pock-marked with the scrufflings of wild boar. I find myself mumbling the words of a local huntsman I met a couple of weeks back. ‘Hi ha almenys cent senglars en aquest bosc.’ At least a hundred boar in these woods, yet in three years I’d never seen more than telltale disturbed earth. One day, perhaps.

Whether it is the thought of boar or the fact that it is cold here in the dummity wood, I quicken my step along the bifurcating path, trusting my sense of direction. This, I think, is how best I like to walk, without map or compass in hand, wandering the borderlands between strangeness and familiarity, with the possibility of getting lost not as threat but as an invitation to learn.

After five minutes or so the path deposits me at a junction of five trails, and here I choose the most direct route out of the woods. As I emerge from the trees onto a low ridge I look up in the hope of seeing a break in the clouds, but the donkey’s belly remains unruffled.

Where the ridge path ends I need to make a choice, since it brings me out on the back road that links Sant Pere de Ribes with the neighbouring town, Vilanova. I could road walk all the way home, but I decide instead to go only as far as the next bend and there pick up a tarmaced trail that meanders through the vineyards that fill the land to the west of town.

At this hour of the day the vineyard trail is alive with the song and flight of countless birds. Blackcaps tut-tut at me from the hedgerows, while down in the vineyards proper, other birds – probably buntings but hard to discern in this light – flit around the bare stumps or perch briefly on the cordon wires along which the new vines will soon be trained. Walking here is easy, and a joy, and before I know it I am dropping down towards town. The path I’m on wends its way through a final patch of woodland before emerging alongside the castell de Ribes, which dominates the landscape on this side of town. Although the origins of the small castle lie in the tenth century it is now little more than a Mediterranean manor house proudly hanging on to its fortified past, its circular defence tower as obsolete as the shaking train of a solitary peacock.

Just after the castle the path empties onto the back road that earlier I had chosen not to take, and here I must choose again. I can make a beeline for home through the centre of town, or loop my way back along the dry bed of the riera. Although rain is in the air today, the last two weeks have been dry with cold nights and warm, sunny middays, so progress across the polished stones and cracked mud of the stream bed is relatively easy. Scattered around me are discarded juice cartons, cans and plastic bottles, man-made erratics that sooner or later will be washed into the sea, adding to our problems.

A path of dry, compact mud opens up now to my right and runs in parallel to the stony bed. It is as I join this path that I see the hound. Black, enormous and alone, sniffing around beneath the carob tree that stands where the riera curves around to the right. I pull up, unsure about the wisdom of moving closer. The hound has caught wind of me and has shifted its position to one of preparedness, head cocked forward, back legs slightly spread, a gangly sprinter desperate to leave the blocks.

I lose sense of time in this moment of shared alert, although it can only be a matter of seconds before I see the woman coming along behind. As she reaches the carob tree the hound cocks its head slightly to the right, and then back again in my direction. I call out to her. ‘Està bé? Puc seguir?’ She calls back, letting me know that yes, it’s fine to walk on. The hound seems as liberated by its owner’s voice as I am, and we set off toward one another almost at the same instant.

When our paths meet, I stop again and allow the dog to explore me with its nose. With its head tipped back its muzzle brushes against my breastbone, although I no longer feel intimidated by its size. It fixes me with amber eyes, and I shudder. Whether there is truly something in those eyes or they are simply acting as a temporary mirror for my own self, I can’t say. All I know is that I sense something forlorn about this creature.

‘Sembla que tens un nou amic!’ His owner is with us now, and she’s right, I can easily imagine this dog as a new friend. ‘Ès un danès?’, I ask her. To my surprise, she not only confirms that the glossy giant is indeed a great dane, but begins to tell me something of their life together. While the dog continues to snuffle at my feet the woman explains to me how our encounter would have been very different had we met five months ago.

‘Ha sigut un treball molt dur, ens ha costat molt.’ It’s been hard work, she tells me, really hard. The dog had been abandoned by its previous owner and had ended up in the hands of a group that organized dog fights for a betting syndicate. I don’t press her on how exactly she and her husband had rescued the dog. It is enough to feel my spirits buoyed by her account of the training they have had to do, day after day, to get the animal to where it is now, a friend in the making. I feel the dog’s wet nose against the back of my hand, and looking down I find myself gazing into its eyes, as if by staring long and hard enough I might discover some deeper truth about this animal’s life.

The woman and I bid our farewells and set off in our respective directions, but after a few steps I find myself pulling up again and turning my head. ‘Bona feina’, I call out to her. Good work. The words sound trite, but I had felt the need to say something, to acknowledge openly that I was glad there were people like her in this world. She pays me the courtesy of looking back. ‘Gràcies’, she says, and walks on, the dog loping ahead of her into a different kind of life.


by 8 Comments

Remnants

The hamlet of Puigmoltó lies about a kilometre to the south-west of my home in Sant Pere de Ribes, and it is easily reached within fifteen minutes along a stony path that cuts through fields that have been planted to the east with carob orchards. Beyond Puigmoltó lies a scraggy woodland dominated by Aleppo pine and mastic bushes, and for the last two years I have been exploring the network of trails that open a way through these trees and shrubs. As I entered the woods last Tuesday afternoon I was drawn from my reverie by a flash of red up ahead. My first thought was that I had caught a glimpse of a bird passing from shade into light, but as I moved closer I realized that what I had seen was a remnant from the previous weekend’s adventure. I had forgotten. Once a year the local cycling club organizes an off-road event that takes full advantage of the wood’s gnarly trails, and what I had caught sight of was one of the coloured tapes the organizers hang from the trees and bushes as waymarks.

IMG_0894-1

As I walked on up through the wood I saw many more of these markers, and I started to get a sense of the route that the competitors would have followed. If there was something melancholic about these tapes two days after the event, then I think it was because they reminded me of the still-worn wristbands of festival goers who are sad to let go.

We depend on trees for many things. Beyond their taking up carbon dioxide and providing a source of timber, they are also places where we can leave our mark. In her poem The Wishing Tree, Kathleen Jamie movingly describes a tree into whose bark have been pressed who knows how many coins, a tree, she tells us, that is now “choking on the small change of human hope”. Were I to come across such a tree in these woods, would I take a coin from my pocket and add my own wish? Possibly, since there are days when it is hard to know how to ease the longing. Maybe that is why we linger when the time comes to remove the remnants of a time well spent.

.

 


by Leave a comment

Midsummer Fires

Arles-sur-Tech is a small town at the eastern end of the French Pyrenees, and it is overshadowed to the north by the Canigó massif. These lands at the southernmost end of the Languedoc-Roussillon region have deep connections to Catalonia, both its language and traditions. On 23 June 1955, Francesc Pujades, a resident of Arles-sur-Tech, took it upon himself to continue a centuries-old European tradition by lighting a bonfire to mark the eve of St John’s Day. What made Pujades’ initiative stand out was that his fire burned at an altitude of 2,784 m, at the summit of the Canigó. The idea that followed was that a torch lit from the fire could serve as a mother flame, la flama, from which St. John’s fires could be lit in succession throughout the Catalan lands. As a symbol of a cultural identity that refused to be extinguished despite the prohibitions set in place by Franco’s dictatorship, la flama had considerable value, yet not until 1966 would the torch pass south of the Pyrenees. Today, however, la flama de Canigó is relayed freely throughout the land on both sides of the mountains, and St John’s Day is now a national holiday in Catalonia. As I walked home just before midnight on St John’s Eve, the streets around the main square of my Catalan hometown, Sant Pere de Ribes, were still alive to the sound of snappers, whistling rockets and conviviality.

In contrast to the light and spark of the night before, the town awoke to slate-grey skies, and around midday an intense storm blew in over the Mediterranean, rinsing the air of the gunpowder perfume that had hung heavy into the early hours. When the storm cleared I went out to walk some of the trails that wind their way through the vineyards, scrub and woodland that surround Sant Pere de Ribes. The dirt track I chose is lined to the west by carob trees, and at this time of year they are festooned with unripe glossy-green pods.

Unripe pods on a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua)

Unripe pods on a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua)

As the carob is also known as St John’s bread it seemed fitting to be following this path on his feast day. It also felt good to be alone after so much companionship the previous evening. Alone, that is, except for the birds, who seemed to be relishing the freshness of the storm-swept air. To my left, finches gold and green flitted over and among the vines, while ahead of me on the path, swallows swooped back and forth like stray fireworks. The skies, however, had yet to clear, and maybe it was this, their colour, that turned my mind to Cornwall. St John’s fires would also have been lit in many towns across my homeland, most notably, perhaps, as part of the Golowan festivities in Penzance. In Cornish, the verb golowi means both to enlighten and to illuminate, from the noun golow, light. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was common for the Feast of St John to be celebrated in Cornwall with bonfires, flaming tar barrels and torches, but adminstrative anxiety over insurance claims doused these traditions, which only re-emerged in force during the 1990s. Nowadays, festivities last a whole week, from St John’s Eve right through to the Feast of St Peter on 29 June.

As its name would suggest, my Catalan hometown of Sant Pere de Ribes also celebrates its annual festival on St Peter’s Day. So, barely a week after the St John’s festivities the streets were once again filled with the sound of fireworks and the hum of expectation. Before joining family for the traditional St Peter’s Eve supper I decided to retrace my steps from the previous week. The afternoon was much hotter this time, and I walked quickly past the carob trees with an eye on the shade offered by the small wood that lies at the head of the trail. Just before I reached the cover of pine and holm oak I stepped off into the scrub to inspect what is a dispenser of sweet carnality to all who walk this path in early September, a gnarled old fig tree. Now, in June, however, only green gobstoppers clung to its branches.

A fig tree (Ficus carica) in June

A fig tree (Ficus carica) in June

I pressed on into the wood and was glad that it offered a shaded path back down to the edge of town where my in-laws live. I reached their house just as the final guests were arriving, so I quickly showered and joined the party for an al fresco supper of cured ham, stuffed omelettes and grilled sardines, followed by a traditional sweet flatbread washed down with a bottle of Cornish sparkling wine that I had been saving for the occasion. As night closed in we waited expectantly for the aerial maroon that would signal the ten-minute countdown. As my in-laws house sits on the western permiter of town it offers a perfect vantage point from which to enjoy the firework display that is launched each year from the tenth-century castle nearby. On the stroke of 11 the first rocket was fired into the air, and for the next twenty minutes the skies were filled with willows and palms, serpents and strobes. The best, however, was yet to come, as the centrepiece of the St Peter’s festivities is a diabolic street parade culminating in the main square. Hessian-clothed and hooded demons of all ages take to the streets, holding aloft staffs from which fountains of fire shower sparks upon the expectant onlookers. The first time you witness it, it all appears quite mad.

St Peter's Eve celebrations in Sant Pere de Ribes

St Peter’s Eve celebrations in Sant Pere de Ribes

As I watched the parade I wondered whether next year I might spend these days in Penzance or in one of the other Cornish fishing communities that mark the Feast of St Peter, their patron, with bonfires. I remembered, then, something I had read back in March on the BBC News website. The item described how the only complete copy of the Catholicon Anglicum, a fifteenth-century Middle-English–Latin dictionary had been purchased by the British Library in order to save it from export to a private collection. Interestingly, one of the entries in this dictionary refers to ‘ban fyre, ignius ossium’, the bone-fire from which our modern bonfire is derived. As a young child I had encountered a similar Latin expression, fragilitis ossium, which for all its apparent authority did nothing to help me understand why my bones broke so much more easily than those of other children. The modern term for brittle bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta, captures more of the problem, since we now know that the fragility is caused by a genetic defect that affects bone formation. Bone is a composite of two materials, a mineral called hydroxyapatite (a form of calcium phosphate) and the protein collagen. In brittle bone disease it is the latter which is deficient, either in quality or quantity, or both. Collagen is important as it gives bones a degree of flexibility, while the job of the mineral hydroxyapatite is to provide a complementary hardness. Too much collagen and our bones would be rubbery; too little or poor quality collagen and they become fragile.

As in so much of life, balance matters. A summer of too many wildfires can cause lasting damage to the scrub and woodland landscapes that surround my Catalan hometown, yet its people nonetheless turn to fire as a way of celebrating the feast days of St John and St Peter. For those who lived through Franco’s dictatorship it is a reminder, perhaps, that they now live in more enlightened times.